1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a smart card (SC) or an integrated circuit (IC) card which may be based on a standard such as Universal Integrated Circuit Card (UICC) or the like or has compatibility with those standards; and more particularly relates to a mobile communications terminal that may accommodate the IC card.
2. Description of Related Art
An integrated circuit (IC) card has an embedded integrated circuit (IC) that may be a logic circuit and be typically coupled to physical interfaces, which allow the IC card to communicate with external devices to perform various functions. The external devices may include a mobile communications terminal, a personal computer, an IC card adapter-writer/reader, and so on.
Most IC cards or UICC are likely to support, in addition to a historical International Standard Organization (ISO) protocol (e.g., ISO 7816), a high speed protocol that can be based on MultiMediaCard (MMC) or Universal Serial Bus (USB). When the UICC or IC card is engaged with the SC writer/reader or the terminal, which may have an IC card adapter, connected to a computer via a high speed protocol interface such as the USB standard, the IC card may provide a user with a low-cost, high-speed serial interface that can be easy to use and support a “plug and play” function to the devices external to the computer. In addition, a single mode IC card may separately support a contactless protocol. In addition, a dual mode IC card may possibly switch from the historical ISO 7816 protocol to the high speed protocol or vice versa.
The integrated circuit (IC) card typically includes eight electrical contacts. However, not all eight electrical contacts are electrically engaged with an embedded processor and some of them are unused. These unused contacts can either be allocated to a specific technology. It can be a significant drawback that if only unused electrical contacts of the IC card can be allocated for the high speed protocol, this allocation of the contacts may be in conflict with the need for contactless protocol because the contactless protocol should be enabled on at least one unused electrical contact as well.
In addition, the issue is that the number of electrical contacts available on the UICC or IC card is typically limited to eight. As the functions and capabilities of wireless communications devices continue to develop, increasing the total number of electrical contacts may be one way to support such developments. However, adding new physical electrical contacts on the UICC can require the significant modifications for both UICC and any external device that needs to communicate with it.